Download the Crash Course DVD

How to Make Your Own Crash Course DVD

If you have a DVD burner on your computer, you can make your own Crash Course DVDs. If you already have a copy of the Basic Edition DVD, just use the software that came with your computer to copy it as many times as you like. The Crash Course Basic Edition disc is not copy-protected the way DVDs containing mass-marketed movies are, so you should have no trouble making copies with standard off-the-shelf software.

If you do not yet have a copy, the entire Crash Course Basic Edition DVD can be produced from an image file called a .ISO file that we have published as a torrent. This is a very large file - too big to be downloaded like a regular file.

Downloading it over a dial-up Internet connection is out of the question - it could take weeks at dialup speed. Even if you have a fast connection, it will still take a long time to download. You will need 3.85GB of free space on your hard disk in order to download the file.

Next, the file is only available through BitTorrent, which is a special protocol for downloading very large files. You'll need a special program called the BitTorrent Client on your computer in order to download the DVD master file. If you don't already have the BitTorrent client on your computer, download and install it from http://www.bittorrent.com/btusers/download.

Then you need to figure out which version of the DVD you actually need - NTSC or PAL. Here are the guidelines:

If you are in North America (including the United States), Japan, South Korea, etc., you want the NTSC version of the DVD. To see a map of countries which use NTSC, click here.

If you are in most of Europe, Australia, and many Asian countries, you need the PAL version of the DVD. To see a map of countries which use PAL, click here.

Once you know whether you need the NTSC or PAL version, and you have installed the BitTorrent Client program on your computer, you can access the torrents. Torrents are tiny files which provide reference information on where your BitTorrent Client needs to go to download the DVD image files:

Clicking on one of those links will allow you to download the torrent file to your computer. Once you have the torrent, double-click it, and it should cause the BitTorrent program to start the download process. This may take a long time, depending on how fast your Internet connection is and how many other users have completed the download and are acting as seeds. A download time of several days is not at all unheard of if you are using a slow connection or there are not many seeds.

When you're done downloading the .ISO file, we would appreciate if you leave BitTorrent running on your computer on occasion. This will help others get a faster download and will help us make the DVD master files available to a wider audience.

Once you've downloaded the .ISO file, you need to burn the DVD from the .ISO file using your computer's DVD burner. You'll need a software program that can burn directly from an image file (.ISO file). If you don't already have a program that does this, we recommend InfraRecorder, which is a free program you can download from http://infrarecorder.org/. Once you have downloaded it, choose the "Burn DVD from image" option, then specify the location of the .ISO file you downloaded using BitTorrent.

We regret that we cannot provide technical support of any kind. We wish we could, but our resources are limited and need to be focused elsewhere. Please rely on the links above for help. You might also try posting in the Forums for help if you need it.